Caitlín R. Kiernan was born on May 26, 1964, in Dublin, Ireland, and came to the United States as a child with his mother and sister. I believe his is an assumed name. That's okay. There have been lots of tellers of weird tales with pseudonyms, adopted names, or assumed names. Last week I heard from the son of Robert Spencer Carr (1909-1994), who let me know that his father's name at birth was Theodore Bonifield. I used that knowledge to update my biography of him. So the truth has come out more than one hundred years after Carr's birth. We're probably not allowed to know Mr. Kiernan's real name. There is supposed to be truth in art. Artists, though, are human beings, and human beings keep secrets, sometimes for all of their lives.
Mr. Kiernan is a writer, publisher, paleontologist, and onetime musician. His credits include novels, short stories, comic book scripts, and at least one screenplay. His first published short story was in 1995 and his first published novel in 1998. Mr. Kiernan lives and works in Alabama. I believe he also lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Although he's still living, his papers are deposited at the John Hay Library at Brown University. If authors' papers are stored in that library alphabetically (I doubt that they are), then Mr. Kiernan's can't be very far away from those of H.P. Lovecraft. Anyway, the author is another comic book and movie person, but his credits are mostly in prose form. Good for him. He's pretty prolific, too, so double good for him.
Caitlín R. Kiernan's story in Weird Tales #367 is called "Night Fishing." It's nine pages long, plus a full-page, illustrated title page. This is the most psychologically and thematically complex of all of the stories so far in the Cosmic Horror Issue. It's probably the best in stylistic terms, too. I especially like an image from his story: "patient as a spider." "Night Fishing" is also the first to refer overtly to the two main themes or images I have identified in this issue. More on that in a while.
Like "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, "Night Fishing" begins with a meta image on its title page. In Mr. Cornell's story, that meta image is a picture of a television set showing on its screen an image of John Mills in the British TV serial Quatermass, broadcast in 1979. (Thanks to reader Mike Harwood for identifying the source and the actor.) In Mr. Kiernan's story, the meta image is a picture of an office with a picture on the wall, an image of the painting "Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth (1948). So the illustration is a picture of a picture. We as readers, then, are looking at a picture of a picture of a woman looking at a house. Could there be in the house a picture on a wall? And in that picture could there be another picture, or even a picture of a picture?
(Actually, the illustration on the title page is a printed image made from an image engraved on a printer's plate and then transferred to a roller--assuming the magazine was printed by an offset process--of an original digital image that does not exist in the real world, showing a picture of an image of a woman looking at the image of a house. In other words, we are at remove after remove from any real, original, physical thing.)
"Night Fishing" is about a troubled man who is undergoing psychiatric treatment. Or is it merely psychological treatment? I have already written about some lack of precision in Weird Tales #367. In "Night Fishing," the narrator lets us know in his first sentence that he's going to a psychiatrist (pg. 33, col. 1). A while later, the psychiatrist is now a psychologist (pg. 33, col. 2). Then he goes back to being a psychiatrist again. There's an important difference to be made between the two, as a psychiatrist is a medical doctor who may treat his or her patients using drugs. In other words, psychiatry takes what could be interpreted as a materialistic approach to problems that may not be materialistic after all. I forgot to mention that Caitlín R. Kiernan is an atheist. And I forgot to mention that his narrator is a physicist.
There are lots of brandnames and a lot of product placement in "Night Fishing." Taco Bell, Coleman, Old Crow and Jack Daniels, Mason jars, Craftsman, Crayola crayons, Xanax, Case knife, TV Guide, Hershey's. There are other proper nouns, too: Snuffy Smith, Red Angus bulls, Sunset Boulevard, Mandelbrot set, Alabaman place names, Schrödinger and Heisenberg, Eisenhower, the King James Bible. Some of that is okay. Some of it makes for concrete detail and lends verisimilitude to a story. But to come across, as you read, a brandname in every few sentences or paragraphs in a story of just nine pages becomes a distraction. It points to something larger going on.
So why do they do it?
Why do writers of today so easily turn to using brandnames in their works? I guess it's a kind of conditioning. They grew up in a consumerist culture, and it all comes naturally to them. They think in terms of what they can buy, or what they might buy one day. In this culture, we are, every day, bombarded with commercial messages. Our favorite names are brandnames. Again and again in the comments section of this blog, I have asked readers to refrain from mentioning where they have bought this thing or that. If you're going to talk about a book, talk about the book, not about where you bought it. Sadly, even fans of fiction and readers of literature are commercially minded. I guess, too, that if your life is largely emptied out of real, human things, you have only commercial products with which to share your thoughts, your feelings, and your days. You develop relationships with them and they become your friends and lovers. Maybe that's one of the reasons that hoarding has become such a problem in our society. People objectify other people and humanize material things. We have it all backwards.
Many people, especially on the left, complain about materialism--commercial materialism--without understanding that to be of the left--Marxist, socialist, generically progressive--is to be, necessarily, a materialist. Erich Fromm, one of the Frankfurt School, was of the left. And yet in his book The Art of Loving (1956), he diagnosed a problem in which people see each other as material objects rather than as real human beings (a real human being being not material but non-material). In seeking after love, we commodify each other. We engage in decision-making as if we were in the marketplace. This is especially pronounced in a liberal, i.e., capitalist society. (This is obviously a Marxian critique. And now I wonder if there is product placement in the work of China Miéville, a known--and whiny--Marxist.) So maybe there is a similar kind of commodification carried out by the artists in our society, a commodification not only within and of their works but also of themselves. Commercial products have become an object of art, equal in importance perhaps to feelings, meaning, relationships, and so on, the original and true currency in the making of art. (Yes, I see the irony here in using the word currency.) And so writers in Weird Tales and elsewhere are like children watching Saturday morning cartoons, focused on the commercials and the brandnames as much as on their favorite shows. What's next as an epigraph? A jingle? A slogan?
But at least Caitlín R. Kiernan knows that there is a bird called a mockingbird and a snake called a water snake. Authors can name every brand of TV show, movie, comic book, and video game they have ever consumed, but they don't know the difference between a bass and a basswood. They should work on that.
To be continued . . .
Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley
